THE FIRST SEED of this book was planted in 1986 at the University of Minnesota when I took part in Dr. Annette Kuhn's seminar "The Making of the Female Character (1450–1650)," which explored the lives of women in a rapidly changing world marked by the decline of the feudal agrarian system and the rise of mercantile capitalism. For me, one of the most intriguing periods of social transformation was the English Civil War and the English Revolution, which underlay it. For several decades in the seventeenth century, the world was turned upside down. Groups like the Ranters, Seekers, Diggers, and Levelers demanded an end to the rule of feudal lords. The newly founded Quaker religion offered a vision of gender and racial equality, a world without slavery or war, in which people bowed to God alone and not to their lords or kings. Of these groups, only the Quakers endured, but not without persecution. Many fled to the American colonies.
What tugged on my curiosity was the possibility that the idealism of the English Revolution somehow survived into the Restoration in the minds of ordinary people who were not willing to forsake their dreams and bow down to the new order. What would happen to a late-seventeenth-century woman who was determined to carve out her own destiny and who demanded the same liberties, both social and sexual, as a man? This was how May's character was conceived.
However, this proved to be my most daunting book to write. I was living in Germany in what, for me at least, was the preInternet age, and finding good research material was a perpetual challenge. Years later, when I showed an early draft of The Vanishing Point to my agent at that time, she advised me to scrap it; books set in this era didn't sell unless they were genre romance novels. Moreover, in her opinion the English setting of the opening chapters would be of no interest to American readers.
I will always regard The Vanishing Point as the book that no one wanted me to write and that perversely became my strongest book thus far, because I was forced to fight so hard to make it happen. This manuscript stretched me to my utmost through a period of considerable upheaval, as life circumstances took me from Germany to California and then to the north of England. In the Lancashire countryside the novel finally took root and gained a life force of its own. My characters' surnames were lifted from seventeenth-century grave markers in village churchyards. My present home is situated at the foot of Pendle Hill, on top of which George Fox received the ecstatic vision that moved him to found the Quakers. Commonword, the nonprofit organization I work with, is housed in the basement of a Friends meetinghouse in Manchester. The yew trees and hawthorn hedges that May longs for in her American exile grow outside my door. Every week I go horseback riding in the village of Grindleton, which, in the seventeenth century, gave its name to a short-lived utopian religious sect: the Grindletonians.
The writing and research for this book stretched over a decade, during which I consulted many books. Standout texts included Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel, David Hackett Fischer's monumental Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, and Frauen in der Geschichte, volumes 2 and 3, edited by Annette Kuhn and Jörn Rüsen. Much of the herb lore comes from Nicholas Culpepper's Complete Herbal. The recipes Hannah discovers in her mother's receipt book are taken from Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife—an admitted anachronism, since that book wasn't published until 1742. Perhaps the most valuable information was imparted by the good people at Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown Settlement, who answered in detail my many questions about life in the colonial Chesapeake. The Sequose River, which appears in this book, exists only in my imagination. At a storytelling retreat at Ty Newydd in Wales, Hugh Lupton's inspired telling of the tale "Glamoury Eye" had a powerful impact on my story.
My thanks go out to all who read this manuscript in draft form, especially to Susan Ito and everyone at Readerville, Cathy Bolton and everyone at Womenswrite, Jane Stubbs, Margaret Batteson, and Susan Stern. My friend Cath Staincliffe, the acclaimed crime writer, taught me much about advanced plotting and how to weave multiple narrative threads together to achieve maximum impact and suspense.
I wish to express my profound gratitude to my agent, Wendy Sherman. This book would have taken much longer to see the light of day without her belief and commitment. My foreign rights agent, Jenny Meyer, worked hard to bring this book to an international audience. I am deeply indebted to my editor, Jane Rosenman. The Vanishing Point would be a much poorer book without her insights and critique.